Composition Notebooks
by BrokenBoneWorld
Summary: Booth has a secret. He keeps a journal. Brennan just happens to find it.


_Damn. Two updates in a day. I think I'm on a roll. _

_I've noticed how I don't do anything for weeks, and then I go on a writing binge and write for hours. Meh. I'm okay with that._

_I don't own Bones or anything related to it. _

--+--

Seeley Booth had a secret.

He kept a journal. Now, he wasn't like a giggling preteen girl, with a pink diary, lock and all. He had a simple, black and white composition notebook. Thirty-Five of them, in fact. In all of these journals, pages were filled with his messy scrawl. They dated back to when his elementary school therapist suggested he started to keep a journal, to record his thoughts and feelings. This was of course, after he had punched little Jimmy Welkins because he had stolen Seeley's tuna sandwich. The therapist said that Seeley showed signs of anger control issues, and if he wasn't monitored, he might start to compulsively steal things, or gamble to a point of addiction. Seeley only knew this because he had stolen the folder from his office. And then promptly went to the weekly game of Go Fish he played with friends in his class.

Whenever he found a few spare hours, and there were no games on, he pulled the big box of these notebooks from the top of the closet. And he read them through. They became a way of remembering the mistakes he had made, and his attempt to learn from them, to never repeat them again. At least that was what his current therapist said when he told him about the notebooks.

Different notebooks would carry different feelings, and different memories. His first notebook was boring, filled with the day to day occurrences of his nine year old life. As he entered middle school, the pages were filled with complaints about his teachers that had it out for him, the football games that he won, and girls that were pretty enough to catch his eye.

His high school notebooks were basically two hundred pages of gloating over his current girlfriend, what base he had managed to get to at the party last night, how drunk he had been, and how he had scored the winning touchdown in the last game of the season.

He documented what had happened that day, every night, without fail.

His military notebooks were the hardest to look back into. Instead of clean, crisp white paper, the pages were almost brown, caked with dirt and sand from the frequent storms. His handwriting was shaky, at parts almost illegible. Those were the only notebooks where the list that was always in the back of his mind was put down on paper.

Whenever he looked into his military notebooks, he had to have a chilled six pack sitting by his side.

Now his notebooks were filled with the cases he had been working, how Bones had managed to tick him off that day, the arguments they had gotten into.

After a particularly tough case, Bones had dropped by with food from their favorite Mexican place. She didn't bother to knock, hadn't for months. He met her in the hall, a little surprised to see her. Normally it was his job to drop by with food and a comforting shoulder.

She had caught him mid-journal reading, but of course, she didn't know this.

He hadn't bothered to put the box away and had left his most recently filled journal open to the middle page, sitting on top of the open box.

"Hey Bones, what are you doing here?" He questioned.

"I brought us some Mexican food. Do you want some?"

"Do you even have to ask? I'm always up for food." She opened the brown paper bag and groaned.

"What's wrong?"

"They got the order wrong. Now we have three Steak Fajitas instead of one Macho Burrito and a Vegetarian Taco."

"I'll go back and switch it out. Do you have the receipt?" She handed him the small piece of paper, and he left without another word.

Temperance looked around with a sigh. Very rarely did she get the chance to be in his apartment alone. She took off her jacket and went to put it in the closet next to his bedroom. She noticed the box sitting in the middle of the floor. It was kind of hard to miss it. She leaned over the bed to get a better look.

A black and white composition notebook was sitting on top, Booth's small, messy scrawl covering the page.

Brennan shoved her jacket into the hall, not bothering to hang it up. She turned the pages in the notebook, revealing page after page of writing. Every page or so there was a break in the flow, and a date would label the entry of that day. She slid down onto the floor, propping the notebook against her legs.

He was writing about what had happened that day. This specific entry was from when Parker just turned four. He wrote about the birthday party, and "Rebecca's latest squeeze". Although she wasn't entirely sure what the phrase "newest squeeze" was, it sounded funny enough, so she laughed.

She stopped quickly though, when his words became more emotional and he started to ask himself why he couldn't be more of a father to Parker and a husband to Rebecca, the way it should be. Little circles on the page were wrinkled, and the blue of the lines were faded and slightly warped. _He must have been crying when he wrote this._ She surmised.

The next entry detailed the case they had been working on. A simple gunshot to the head. They had solved it in record time, but they had taken the paperwork slowly. Neither of them had enjoyed paperwork.

"It was her boyfriend. She was cheating, so he killed her. Ya know, I'm never gonna understand the inner workings of jealous boyfriend's mind. Sure, I'm _occasionally_ jealous of Rebecca's boyfriends, but I mean, C'mon. She's the mother of my son, for God's sake. In this case, they'd barely been going out a month.

Bones and I finished the case in a day, and spent the rest of the time given to us to complete paperwork screwing around. I ate pie, and she said I was going to die of a heart attack in five years. It was great. I guess we're going to have to get together this weekend and finish up the paperwork. Damn. What a shame. I surely do hate having to work on the weekends with my partner. It's not like I ever plan it or anything."

The door opened and Booth's voice boomed out "Hey Bones! I got the food. They even payed for it, 'cause they screwed up the order." Booth checked the living room, glancing down the hall to find Brennan engrossed in one of his notebooks.

"Bones! What're you doing? That's very...personal." He snatched the book away from her, throwing it into the box before shoving the whole thing unceremoniously into the closet.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of, Booth."

"I'm not ashamed, Bones. I'm-" He interjected. She kept on going.

"It's natural to want to record your life. Many people do it. They've been doing it for ages. Artifacts have been found in tombs in Ancient Egypt, recording the deceased ones life. It's built into our systems to want confirmation of our existence."

"Whatever. You still shouldn't have read my notebooks. They're personal. It's in my right to privacy!" She rolled her eyes.

"You shouldn't be embarrassed. I put pieces of my life in my books, so that is some kind of a diary. The only difference is that thousands of people read my diary. I'm not embarrassed in the slightest."

"Whatever, Bones. Just don't do it again." He stomped out of his room, to the now corrected orders of food.

"Are you hungry or what?" He called.

Temperance smirked, noting the location of his journals for future visits to his house.


End file.
